Pages

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

A Radical Question about the CIA in the Mainstream Press
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Several days ago, the New York Times, which of course epitomizes the mainstream press in America, asked a question that ordinarily would be found mainly on libertarian websites like that of The Future of Freedom Foundation. In the Room for Debate section of the Times’ Opinion Pages, the Times asked: “Do We Need the C.I.A.?”

In the introduction to the debate, the Times pointed out:

Since Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan introduced bills in 1991 and 1995 to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency and transfer its powers to the State Department, many have continued to share his concerns about the agency’s competence and performance. The Senate intelligence committee’s report on the use of torture is the latest example of the agency’s controversies.

The Times concludes its introduction with this remarkable question:

Would the security needs of the United States be better served if the C.I.A. were dismantled?

That is a remarkable development. When was the last time you read that question being asked by anyone in the mainstream press? Wouldn’t we ordinarily see the question posed in the following manner: “Is It Time to Reform the CIA?”

Some of the debaters, not surprisingly, said that the CIA is more important than ever, especially to keep us safe and to protect “national security.”

Others argued for defanging the CIA by limiting it to intelligence gathering and ending its power to engage in covert operations. That would obviously be an improvement but these debaters fail to understand something important about the CIA: If it is left in existence, it will do whatever it wants to do because it knows that no one is able to do anything about it anyway.

Juan Tokatlian, an Argentinian professor, stated, “A thorough reorganization, even dismantling, of the agency is needed, but the details of how that should be done will only be clear once the agency’s impunity is ended, a vigorous accountability is put in place and an independent scrutiny and new leadership are established.”

The existence of an agency like the CIA is totally contrary to the principles of a free society. There were many people who pointed that out when the Truman administration called the CIA into existence in 1947 to wage a “cold war” against America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union. Critics pointed out that it was wrong for America to embrace totalitarian methods in the name of combating totalitarianism. They pointed out that the federal government would end up looking like a totalitarian regime.

Who can deny that those critics have been proven correct? It’s not just the post-9/11 torture scandal. The CIA has been engaged in evil, immoral, dark-side activities since its inception, all guided by the mindset of “patriots” who were protecting “national security” from the communists and, later, from the drug dealers, the “terrorists,” and anyone else who could be used to scare Americans into keeping quiet about the CIA’s steady acquisition of secret, omnipotent power.

The CIA knowingly employed Nazis, including ones who had participated in the Holocaust, all the while keeping it secret from the American people.

The CIA destroyed democratic regimes all the over the world and installed brutal and tyrannical dictatorships in their stead.

The CIA initiated horrendous medical experiments on unsuspecting Americans in its MKULTRA program and then destroyed its records so that the American people would not discover the full details of what they had done.

The CIA partnered with the Mafia, one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world, in formal assassination program directed against the communist president of Cuba, a country that has never attacked the United States. It also orchestrated a sneak attack on the island, which was an ignominious failure. It also initiated destructive terrorist attacks within Cuba itself and, in fact, is still obsessed with ousting the Castro regime and installing another pro-U.S. dictatorial regime in its stead, much like the pro-U.S. dictatorial regime in Egypt.

The CIA initiated a formal program of assassination and, in fact, participated in the assassination or execution of people around the world, including as a partner in the infamous DINA assassination ring run by Chilean military strongman Augusto Pinoche, who the CIA helped install into power after destroying Chile’s longtime democratic tradition. To this day, there is still no reckoning on the CIA’s participation in the execution of two innocent American men, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, during the Chilean coup in 1973, which the CIA helped to orchestrate. For that matter, there is still no accountability for the CIA’s participation in the assassination of Chilean Army Commander General Rene Schneider, whose only “crime” was to support and defend the Chilean constitution against the CIA’s illegal and unconstitutional coup.

The CIA has engaged in assassination and torture since at least the 1950s, as reflected by the mysterious Project X, another CIA program whose records were destroyed in 1992 to prevent the American people from learning about them. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it continues to assassinate people in different parts of the world, just as Pinochet’s international assassination ring did.

From its inception, the CIA has meddled in the affairs of other countries and continues to do so. It is without a doubt the world’s biggest troublemaker, and it is the American people who are bearing the brunt of all the trouble.

Where in the Constitution does it authorize an agency like the CIA? The fact is that the very existence of the CIA has converted the original concept of limited government into unlimited government. For as long as one part of the government has unlimited powers, that automatically means that the federal government has unlimited powers.

More important, how are the CIA’s policies and practices consistent with moral principles and a society supposedly guided by Judeo-Christian ethics?

President Truman recognized the sinister nature of this monster that he himself had brought into existence. Thirty days after the JFK assassination, Truman wrote an op-ed that was published in the Washington Post stating that the CIA had gone far beyond what he had imagined for it.

The problem, of course, is that most Americans are convinced that they live in a free society and that the CIA is necessary to protect their freedom. Today’s Americans epitomize Goethe’s dictum, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Libertarians have long called for the abolition, not the reform, of the CIA. Naturally, there are those who think that that’s just tilting at windmills. The CIA has become a permanent part of America’s governmental structure, they say, and there isn’t any point going outside the “correct and proper” parameters of debate and discussion regarding the role of government in a free society.

And yet, here is the New York Times asking: Is it time to abolish the CIA? The fact that the Times even asks the question is a testament to the importance of hewing to libertarian principles rather settling for reform proposals. Over time, ideas on liberty percolate and find their way into the minds of others. And suddenly there are prominent people in mainstream American life asking, “Why not abolish the CIA?”

Finally, for those who are still convinced that the CIA is necessary to “keep us safe,” let’s not forget one important fact: The CIA failed to detect or prevent the biggest terrorist attack in American history — the 9/11 attacks. What good is it if it couldn’t even “keep us safe” from that? Moreover, let’s also not forget that the 9/11 attacks were the direct consequence of U.S. foreign policy abroad, including the dark-side policies and practices of the CIA.

So, New York Times, the answer to your question is: Yes, most definitely, the time for abolishing the CIA is long past due. It’s a key to restoring a free, prosperous, and secure society to our land. Thanks for asking the question because it will almost certainly cause others to ponder it.

For more articles on abolishing the CIA, see:

Don’t Reform the CIA, Abolish It by Jacob G. Hornberger

Once Again, the Only Solution Is: Abolish the CIA by Jacob G. Hornberger

Ditch your traditions and Old Glory for the new age -- The New World Order. An order by which there will no longer be an America, but rather a collective world.

Today I received an email from the Rutherford Institute[1] which provides free legal council regarding civil liberty matters. The letter is shown below.

Yes, you read that correctly...

In an age of political correctness, we must approve laws to protect the laws that protect us in the first place.

Saying it that way sounds pretty ridiculous, but it's true. What this case shows is that we have reached a tipping point where we must have more laws to defend our 1st Amendment right which is already supposed to protect our free speech. If you didn't read my post "My- What BIG Laws You Have"[2] you'll get a better understanding to how we as a nation are burdened with so many laws that it's incredibly difficult to have a just judicial system that is truly unbiased and credible.

The trend is all around us

There are TONS of examples of people not able to fly or wear the American flag. In addition to the instance above, here's just a few more:

A West New York town in Northern New Jersey was considering banning all American Flag displays across the town in 2013.[3]
HOA will not allow 93 yr old veteran to fly American Flag on his property. He will face penalty if he does.[4]
A public housing authority won't allow a 75 yr old woman fly small American flags from her balcony.[5]

Other Anti-American trends are developing within Amerika

On Debate.org, 60% of people believe our constitution is outdated![6] How many liberal pundits have you heard saying the 2nd Amendement does not apply in today's world?

A police officer was recorded on camera stating that we need Anti-mine resistant Armored Personnel Carriers because there are a lot of "Constitutionalists" out there that own guns and are a threat to law enforcement.[7]

The controversial amnesty that is about to occur will grant millions of immigrants citizenship (or an expedient path to it) without requiring a basic understanding and appreciation of our country's founding, our constitution, & our rights.*Don't get me wrong, I support immigration as my father is an immigrant from the Phillipines. However, he worked for it because he believed in what America stood for and the opportunities it could provide. His citizenship required basic education like reciting the pledge, understanding our constitution, etc.

There are so many more examples that there is not enough time to speak of them. What we must understand is that this Anti-Americanism is spreading not just within the United States, but abroad as well (mostly due to our corrupt policies).

Just as the debate.org poll suggested above, and as I mentioned in my post The American Zero Hour,[8] there are still roughly 50% of citizens still faithful to "America". With civil wars erupting all across the world, it seems that we are steadily heading into our own.

Winston Churchill famously said “history is written by the victors,” and truth is often the first casualty in the aftermath of conflict.

Last week, “historian” Mark Updegrove, who doubles as a paid employee of the taxpayer-financed Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, stretched the envelop in a Politico article in which he claimed that the new movie “Selma,” (starring Giovanni Ribisi, Oprah Winfrey, and David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King), distorts the relationship between President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the civil rights leader. Ironically, Updegrove claims that the movie misrepresents historical truth when it is Updegrove’s narrative that repeats the sanitized “history” of the poisoned relationship between LBJ and MLK.

Next, former LBJ associate Joseph Califano jumped into the fray in the Washington Post, claiming that the “Selma” movie doesn’t properly reflect the productive relationship between Johnson and King.

Of course, both Updegrove and Califano failed to even mention Dr. King’s pivotal opposition to the Vietnam War, which would win the enmity of LBJ. Updegrove and Califano are both trying to truncate history with this omission.

The truth is that Lyndon Baines Johnson was a life-long segregationist who resisted numerous attempts to eliminate the poll tax and literacy tests during his twenty-three year career in the House and Senate. He blocked every major and minor piece of meaningful civil rights legislation as the leader of the Southern block in the US Senate, and as its powerful Majority Leader.

It was Lyndon Johnson who neutered the 1957 Civil Rights Act with a poison pill amendment that required violators of the Act be tried before state (all-white), not federal juries. Many contemporary liberals including Joseph Rauh, the president of Americans for Democratic Action, and A. Philip Randolph, a vice president of the AFL-CIO, called the bill worthless, and “worse than no bill at all.”

As Vice President, Lyndon Johnson orchestrated southern congressional opposition to JFK’s civil rights agenda and repeatedly warned JFK to go slow on the civil rights, voting rights, and open housing legislation that Kennedy had promised in his 1960 campaign.

LBJ, it seems, was reserving these initiatives for himself. He repeatedly cautioned President Kennedy to wait “until the time is right.” On Capitol Hill, Johnson simultaneously lobbied his “establishment” friends to stall that same legislation.

Johnson would do an about-face on civil rights immediately upon becoming president, apparently now that the “time was right.” He did so to begin the creation of a grand legacy for himself through the passage of the same legislation that he had previously impeded, and to fend-off a challenge from Robert F. Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic convention.

His maneuvering also gave him currency in the left wing of his party so that he could escalate the Vietnam War unimpeded, having won its support. He had also promised his longtime supporters in the defense contracting business, as well as the Pentagon, that after he was reelected “you’ll get your war.”
LBJ would quickly repeal executive orders by JFK aimed at beginning the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam that would have been completed by 1965. Instead, by that year, hundreds of thousands of young draftees were sent to Americanize that civil war.

Johnson’s complete turnabout on civil rights was also timed to silence those on the left who were suspicious about the fact that their hero, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was gunned down in Lyndon Johnson’s home state.

In his Politico piece, Updegrove points out that King can’t resist telling Johnson that “if Negros had been registered to vote in the southern states that voted for Goldwater, LBJ would have carried every state in 1964.” Yet somehow Updegrove fails to tell us that Johnson would boast that “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for 200 years” in his banter with a group of southern governors.

Johnson’s embrace of civil rights is apparently not based on a moral principle; even when LBJ does the right thing, he does it for self-interest, as part of his plan to create a grand legacy for himself.
In fact, LBJ did none of the arm-twisting for the 1964 Civil Rights Act himself. He left that to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Neither Johnson nor Humphrey could deliver all Democrats, though, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act only passed with the support of Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and 27 Senate Republicans. LBJ did strip the voting rights section out of the 1964 bill, saving it for still another bill in 1965 so it would add another “bullet” for his legacy.

Johnson was perfectly happy to threaten Dr. King. It was under the administration of President Lyndon Johnson that the FBI heavily wiretapped Dr. King and the FBI sent an anonymous letter to King threatening to expose his sexual infidelity and taste for white women unless he committed suicide. Johnson’s neighbor and longtime political ally, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, obtained Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s authority to wiretap King’s bedroom by invoking the authority of the President – Lyndon Johnson. Hoover liked to play the recordings of King’s sexual trysts at cocktail parties of his elite friends for amusement.

In his strange effort to recast the enmity that LBJ held for King, Updegrove is quick to quote King assistant Andrew Young as claiming that LBJ needed the Selma march as an impetus for the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Updegrove then tries to tell us that the movie “Selma” obscures a warm and productive relationship between Johnson and King. Airbrushed out of Updegrove’s narrative is King’s speech of April 4, 1967 in which King came out strongly against the Vietnam War, causing Johnson to fly into a Texas-sized rage calling King “that nigger preacher,” according to the same Andrew Young.

With his opposition to the war, King became a moral force who challenged the political establishment and the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Shortly before his death, Hoover’s FBI would overhear King on a wiretap telling a close associate that “Bobby Kennedy is my main man” and disclosing his intention to endorse Kennedy in his fledging bid to win the White House in 1968. One can imagine the speed with which J. Edgar Hoover would have made President Johnson aware of King’s comments. Three weeks later King would be dead. Nine weeks later Robert Kennedy would be dead.

Lyndon Johnson should be remembered not for the myths about his “greatness,” but for the damages he wrought, the most horrific being the conduct of the Vietnam war for his own pecuniary and political advantage. The myths that he created, now being perpetuated by his still-sycophantic assistants and the new director of the LBJ Library, are merely evidence that Johnson perfected the skills that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, once asserted: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

I’m always amazed at how Marxist academics always — always — pretend to be taking the moral high road while associating themselves with the ideology of mass murder and the obliteration of human civilization that was responsible for the death of hundreds of millions during the last century.

The latest “hero” among academic Marxists is one Thomas Piketty, a French Marxist economist who has written what he considers to be an updated version of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. His book, Capital in the 21st Century, has drawn praise from leftist ideologues everywhere, especially his most fawning fan, Paul Krugman.

It’s the same old story: Isn’t “inequality” horrible. The state must steal from the productive class and give their money to the parasitic class (while paying economic advisors like Thomas Piketty and Jonathan Gruber handsome consulting fees to “justify” it all).

In a nutshell, Thomas Piketty’s book can be summarized by the following syllogism: 1). Socialism has always and everywhere been a colossal disaster for humanity; 2) Just about everyone knows this; 3) therefore, we need more socialism.

Of course, the only real solution to Piketty’s “problem” of capital earning higher returns on investment than labor is radical tax cutting, privatization, and deregulation of industry in order to create more economic freedom to become entrepreneurs and capitalists. Flooding the world with more and more entreprenurial capitalists would eventually drive down the rate of return to capital, at which time we can count on a future Thomas Piketty to write a thousand-page book about that kind of “inequality.”

2014 has been a year of anniversaries. It was the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War — a war which many at the time saw as madness, and predicted that it would be the harbinger of a Second World War a generation later.

2014 was also the 70th anniversary of the fateful landing at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of World War II.

2014 was likewise the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and of the beginning of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” programs.

Anniversaries are opportunities to look back at historic turning points, compare the rhetoric of the time with the reality that we now know unfolded — and to learn hard lessons about the difference between rhetoric and reality for our own time.

A hundred years ago, the President of the United States was Woodrow Wilson — the first president to openly claim that the Constitution of the United States was outdated, and that courts should erode the limits that the Constitution placed on the federal government.

Today, after a hundred years of courts’ eroding the Constitution’s protections of personal freedom, we now have a president who has taken us dangerously close to one-man rule, unilaterally changing laws passed by Congress and refusing to enforce other laws — on immigration especially.

Like Woodrow Wilson, our current president is charismatic, vain, narrow and headstrong. Someone said of Woodrow Wilson that he had no friends, only devoted slaves and enemies. That description comes all too close to describing Barack Obama, with his devoted political palace guard in the White House that he listens to, in contrast to the generals he ignores on military issues and the doctors he ignores on medical issues.

Both Wilson and Obama have been great phrase makers and crowd pleasers. We are still trying to cope with the havoc left in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s ringing phrase about “the self-determination of peoples.”

First of all, it was never “self-determination.” It was the arbitrary determination of the fate of millions of people in nations carved out of empires dismembered by the victors after the First World War.

Neither the Irish in Britain nor the Germans in Bohemia were allowed to determine who would rule them. Nor was anybody in Africa.

The consequence of fragmenting large nations was the creation of small and vulnerable nations that Hitler was able to pick off, one by one, during the 1930s.

Minorities who protested that they were being oppressed under the Austro-Hungarian Empire got their own nations, where their own oppression of other minorities was often worse than they had experienced in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

We are still trying to sort out the chaos in the Middle East growing out of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. How long it will take to sort out the havoc left behind by Barack Obama’s foreign policies only the future will tell.

It should be noted that, after the charismatic Woodrow Wilson, none of the next three presidents was the least bit charismatic. Let us hope that the voters today have also learned how dangerous charisma and glib rhetoric can be — and what a childish self-indulgence it is to choose a president on the basis of symbolism. Woodrow Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War, as Obama was to become the first black president. But neither fact qualified them to wield the enormous powers of the presidency. Nor will being the first woman president, the first Hispanic president or other such firsts.

Since 2014 has been the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” we should note that this was another war that the Johnson administration lost. Both President Johnson and President John F. Kennedy before him said that the purpose of the “war on poverty” was to help people become self-supporting, to end dependency on government programs. But 50 years and trillions of dollars later, there is more dependency than ever.

‘You’re Either a Cop or Little People’: The American Police State in 2014

By John W. Whitehead

“You’re either a cop or little people.”—Police captain Harry Bryant in Blade Runner

For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.

As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.

We’ve had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after “accidental” encounters with marauding SWAT teams. We’ve been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border, now considered “Constitution-free zones.” We’ve had our faces filed in government databases, our biometrics crosschecked against criminal databanks, and our consumerist tendencies catalogued for future marketing overtures.

We’ve been given the runaround on government wrongdoing, starting with President Obama’s claim that the National Security Agency has never abused its power to spy on Americans’ phone calls and emails. All the while, the NSA has been racing to build a supercomputer that could break through “every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.” Despite the fact that the NSA’s domestic surveillance program has been shown to be ineffective at preventing acts of terrorism, the agency continues to vacuum up almost 200 million text messages a day.

We’ve seen the police transformed from community peacekeepers to point guards for the militarized corporate state. From Boston to Ferguson and every point in between, police have pushed around, prodded, poked, probed, scanned, shot and intimidated the very individuals—we the taxpayers—whose rights they were hired to safeguard. Networked together through fusion centers, police have surreptitiously spied on our activities and snooped on our communications, using hi-tech devices provided by the Department of Homeland Security.

We’ve been deemed suspicious for engaging in such dubious activities as talking too long on a cell phone and stretching too long before jogging, dubbed extremists and terrorists for criticizing the government and suggesting it is tyrannical or oppressive, and subjected to forced colonoscopies and anal probes for allegedly rolling through a stop sign.

We’ve been arrested for all manner of “crimes” that never used to be considered criminal, let alone uncommon or unlawful, behavior: letting our kids walk to the playground alone, giving loose change to a homeless man, feeding the hungry, and living off the grid.

We’ve been sodomized, victimized, jeopardized, demoralized, traumatized, stigmatized, vandalized, demonized, polarized and terrorized, often without having done anything to justify such treatment. Blame it on a government mindset that renders us guilty before we’ve even been charged, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing. In this way, law-abiding individuals have had their homes mistakenly raided by SWAT teams that got the address wrong. One accountant found himself at the center of a misguided police standoff after surveillance devices confused his license plate with that of a drug felon.

We’ve been railroaded into believing that our votes count, that we live in a democracy, that elections make a difference, that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, and that our elected officials are looking out for our best interests. Truth be told, we live in an oligarchy, politicians represent only the profit motives of the corporate state, whose leaders know all too well that there is no discernible difference between red and blue politics, because there is only one color that matters in politics—green.

We’ve gone from having privacy in our inner sanctums to having nowhere to hide, with smart pills that monitor the conditions of our bodies, homes that spy on us (with smart meters that monitor our electric usage and thermostats and light switches that can be controlled remotely) and cars that listen to our conversations and track our whereabouts. Even our cities have become wall-to-wall electronic concentration camps, with police now able to record hi-def video of everything that takes place within city limits.

We’ve had our schools locked down, our students handcuffed, shackled and arrested for engaging in childish behavior such as food fights, our children’s biometrics stored, their school IDs chipped, their movements tracked, and their data bought, sold and bartered for profit by government contractors, all the while they are treated like criminals and taught to march in lockstep with the police state.

We’ve been rendered enemy combatants in our own country, denied basic due process rights, held against our will without access to an attorney or being charged with a crime, and left to molder in jail until such a time as the government is willing to let us go or allow us to defend ourselves.

We’ve had the very military weapons we funded with our hard-earned tax dollars used against us, from unpiloted, weaponized drones tracking our movements on the nation’s highways and byways and armored vehicles, assault rifles, sound cannons and grenade launchers in towns with little to no crime to an arsenal of military-grade weapons and equipment given free of charge to schools and universities.

We’ve been silenced, censored and forced to conform, shut up in free speech zones, gagged by hate crime laws, stifled by political correctness, muzzled by misguided anti-bullying statutes, and pepper sprayed for taking part in peaceful protests.

We’ve been shot by police for reaching for a license during a traffic stop, reaching for a baby during a drug bust, carrying a toy sword down a public street, and wearing headphones that hamper our ability to hear.

We’ve had our tax dollars spent on $30,000 worth of Starbucks for Dept. of Homeland Security employees, $630,000 in advertising to increase Facebook “likes” for the State Dept., and close to $25 billion to fund projects ranging from the silly to the unnecessary, such as laughing classes for college students and programs teaching monkeys to play video games and gamble.

We’ve been treated like guinea pigs, targeted by the government and social media for psychological experiments on how to manipulate the masses. We’ve been tasered for talking back to police, tackled for taking pictures of police abuses, and threatened with jail time for invoking our rights. We’ve even been arrested by undercover cops stationed in public bathrooms who interpret men’s “shaking off” motions after urinating to be acts of lewdness.

We’ve had our possessions seized and stolen by law enforcement agencies looking to cash in on asset forfeiture schemes, our jails privatized and used as a source of cheap labor for megacorporations, our gardens smashed by police seeking out suspicious-looking marijuana plants, and our buying habits turned into suspicious behavior by a government readily inclined to view its citizens as terrorists.

We’ve been told that national security is more important than civil liberties, that police dogs’ noses are sufficient cause to carry out warrantless searches, that the best way not to get raped by police is to “follow the law,” that what a police officer says in court will be given preference over what video footage shows, that an upright posture and acne are sufficient reasons for a cop to suspect you of wrongdoing, that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous tip, and that police officers have every right to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened.

Now there are those who still insist that they are beyond the reach of the police state because they have done nothing wrong and have nothing to fear. To those sanctimonious few, secure in their delusions, let this be a warning: the danger posed by the American police state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law abider alike, black and white, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, blue collar and white collar, and any other distinction you’d care to trot out.

The lesson of 2014 is simply this: in a police state, you’re either a cop or you’re one of the little people. Right now, we are the little people, the servants, the serfs, the grunts who must obey without question or suffer the consequences.

If there is to be any hope in 2015 for restoring our freedoms and reclaiming our runaway government, we will have to start by breathing life into those three powerful words that set the tone for everything that follows in the Constitution: “we the people.”

It’s time to stop waiting patiently for change to happen and, as Gandhi once advised, be the change you want to see in the world.

Get mad, get outraged, get off your duff and get out of your house, get in the streets, get in people’s faces, get down to your local city council, get over to your local school board, get your thoughts down on paper, get your objections plastered on protest signs, get your neighbors, friends and family to join their voices to yours, get your representatives to pay attention to your grievances, get your kids to know their rights, get your local police to march in lockstep with the Constitution, get your media to act as watchdogs for the people and not lapdogs for the corporate state, get your act together, and get your house in order.

In other words, get moving. Time is growing short, and the police state is closing in. Power to the people!

Sometimes, real life can be stranger than parody. This can be particularly true when it comes to the beat we cover here at The Watch, civil liberties. With that in mind, I’ve gone out on a limb to make some predictions about what might happen on the civil liberties front in 2015. I realize that some of these prognostications may seem a wee bit hyperbolic, a bit paranoid, maybe even a little nutty. But I think we can all agree that we should hope none of them actually do come to pass.

So on with the predictions. In 2015, I foresee the following:

• A state judge will quite reasonably suggest that prosecutors shouldn’t suborn perjury, shouldn’t retaliate against political opponents, shouldn’t suppress evidence, and that we should discipline those who do. That state’s prosecutors will revolt, accuse the judge of bias and demand that the judge recuse himself from all criminal cases.

• In the name of “preparation,” school officials will stage terrifying active-shooter scenarios on children in which cops and other community leaders storm school buildings with guns. In some cases, neither parents nor children will be notified ahead of time that the scenario is a drill. In others, kids will be recruited to play victims, complete with bloody bullet holes and gaping wounds.

• We’ll see a record number of wrongly convicted men and women get exonerated, including some on death row. We’ll also see some horrifying executions gone wrong. Perversely, some death penalty states will respond by speeding up their executions — and making them less transparent.

• A large percentage of those wrongly convicted people will never be compensated for their arrests, convictions and time in prison.

• Officers at a major metropolitan police department will get caught breaking the law by fabricating tickets in order to steal overtime pay from taxpayers. However, a court will rule that because the officers’ supervisors were also breaking the law, the officers can’t be held accountable.

• The indiscriminate police raids will continue, with aggressive, door-kicking raids on people suspected of increasingly petty crimes, such as credit card fraud and underage drinking. In a rare moment of sanity, at least one federal appeals court will decide that maybe SWAT raids are an unconstitutionally excessive way to conduct regulatory inspections. But such raids will continue elsewhere.

• At least one former politician will come to appreciate how dangerous this trend really is, but only after he gets raided himself.

• 2015 will also show that you can be subjected to a violent police raid for merely shopping at a gardening store.

• The government will dispense with “due process” and just start seizing property from people without even charging them with a crime, much less convicting them of one. The proceeds from these seizures will then go back to the police departments and prosecutor officers that did the seizing.

• Some cities will hand out free condoms . . . then arrest women who are in possession of them, on the theory that only women involved in sex work carry condoms.

• The Supreme Court will rule that the government is allowed to charge you with a crime, then seize all of your money before trial, on the argument that it is connected to that crime — thus preventing you from paying for your defense.

• The federal government will offer snazzy new surveillance equipment to local police departments. But those departments will then use that equipment in investigations that have nothing to do with national or homeland security. To protect the technology, the federal government will then instruct those police departments to lie to judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys about when and how the technology is used, even if that means committing perjury.

• In the never-ending drive to “get tough on sex offenders,” cities will continue to demand that people convicted of some sex-related crimes register with the government. But they’ll make it increasingly difficult for them to do so, and then punish them when they fail to comply.

• Governments at all levels will continue to prosecute people for destroying evidence in criminal cases, but brazenly conclude that government officials at all levels can destroy evidence with virtual impunity.

• The federal government will stop pretending to care about individual rights . . . and decide that pretty much everyone is a terrorist.

• The federal courts will rule that the government no longer needs to actually convict you of a crime in order to punish you for it.

• After getting caught failing to turn over exculpatory evidence, some prosecutor will decide that it’s better to let potentially dangerous felons go free than allow for the transparency that might reveal that they have broken the rules.

• Some interest groups will argue that people accused of committing crimes against a particular class of well-educated, upper-income people are afforded too many constitutional protections, and thus aren’t getting convicted enough. They’ll demand extrajudicial tribunals run by people with no experience in law. They’ll also demand that the whole process be governed by lower evidentiary standards and a watered-down Bill of Rights — but again, only for people accused of crimes against this particular group of people. These tribunals will be implemented, often with predictable, unjust results. Nevertheless, prominent pundits will speak out in support of the idea, arguing that because the punishment for a conviction in the tribunals is something less than prison, due process isn’t really all that important.

• In a new low for the drug war, the Drug Enforcement Administration will get caught using a woman’s real name, photo and photos of her children — all without her permission — in order to facilitate drug deals with criminals.

• Some U.S. cities will pay out tens of millions of dollars in police brutality claims. In all but a handful of instances, the individual officers involved will not be held accountable.

• In some places, arrestees will sit in a jail cell for more than a year before they’re charged or permitted to see a judge.

• We’ll learn about more cases in which police have subjected innocent people to anal penetration and forced colonoscopies in order to search for drugs.

• Someone will die in jail after getting arrested for pot possession.

• Some jurisdictions will drop any pretense of fairness, and just start letting cops serve on grand juries — including grand juries that investigate shootings of and by other cops.

• We’ll start arresting working parents for the “crime” of letting their kids play in public places without supervision. Some of these parents will face felony charges and the possibility of losing custody of their children.

• In the latest panic over teen “sexting,” local law enforcement officials somewhere will hit a new low, arguing that a court should allow them to forcibly induce an erection in a teenage boy in order to prove that the boy’s penis is the one depicted in a photo sent to a teenage girl.

• To demonstrate the dangers of marijuana, prosecutors will push on with the trial of a man accused of cultivating the drug for his own use, despite the fact that his deteriorating health required him to be rushed from the court to a hospital in mid-trial.

• Police will detain and handcuff some poor guy because of . . . Nickelback.

• As the country continues to debate police militarization, one state’s police SWAT teams will bizarrely claim that they are private corporations, and therefore immune to open-records laws.

• And some town will grow so fearful of its own police department that it will ask a state police agency for help.

• Some drug cops will blow a hole in a toddler’s chest in order to nab a guy suspected of selling $50 worth of meth.

• The government will send a guy off to fight a pointless war, fail to adequately treat his post-traumatic stress disorder when he gets back, and, when his PTSD inevitably causes him to lash out, send a SWAT team that will kill him.

• Poverty itself will become a crime in the United States.

• Some poor guy will face a potential life sentence for selling pot brownies.

• We’ll continue to arrest children. I predict that this year, some police department will arrest and handcuff . . . let’s say a 9-year-old girl.

• We’ll also start Tasering children.

• Some poor kid who’s getting bullied at school will try to record the bullying (and lack of help from the faculty). That will get him arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

• Some city council will get upset enough about repeat incidents of police lying and misconduct, and that despite the fact that while citizen complaints have gone up, investigations of those complaints have gone down. It will consider a law mandating termination for any cop caught lying under oath. But it will then vote down the law after getting assured by the police chief that his officers are trustworthy.

• The Justice Department will decide that the public doesn’t deserve to know when federal prosecutors commit misconduct, despite studies showing that misconduct at the federal level is rampant.

• Some dumb city officials will order a police raid, arrests and criminal charges because a parody Twitter account hurt the mayor’s feelings.

• Law enforcement officials in a major U.S. city will argue — apparently with a straight face — that cops must be allowed to have sex with prostitutes in order to properly investigate them.

• In some places, it will become a crime for a pregnant woman to have a miscarriage or stillbirth.

• In other places, it will become a crime to feed the homeless.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already figured out the joke. None of these are predictions for 2015. They’re all things that actually happened in 2014.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Who Are the Neocons and How Did They Gain Power
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The ideological movement that calls itself neoconservative is small, potent, and extremely dangerous. Oh, and its members don’t like lewrockwell.com, either.

Founded by followers of Leon Trotsky, they liked Lenin but not Stalin, who killed Trotsky. These left-wing intellectuals now run the conservative movement and the Republican party. How the heck did that happen?

They applied the tactics they learned from Bolshevism to become first, left-liberals, and then, new conservatives. In every mask, they have been very successful, but while there are important neo-liberals (Democratic neocons), they have had the most effect in the GOP.

From the days of Reagan, especially, and their almost total victory under Bush II, the neocons have exerted immense influence not only in politics, but in academia and the media.

Their policies are no longer openly socialist; indeed, they promote a government-controlled capitalism, instead. But their belief in global empire, perpetual war, the police state, central banking, total surveillance, and an omnipotent executive has never changed. Now, however, thanks to them, that’s called Republican conservatism.

Perhaps the first neocon was Leo Strauss, an admirer of the totalitarian Plato, and who advocated rule by intellectuals who, from behind the scenes, would put neocon ideas into practice not only through machinations and the “Noble Lie” (needed to fool the peons into obedience), and through connections to the state’s intelligence organs. The neocons have always been very, very close to the CIA.

Who are the neocons? The late Irving Kristol is properly called their godfather. Bill Buckley was important, too. Today they include such figures as Bill Kristol, John McCain, Charles Krauthammer, and Sean Hannity. Their institutions include everything from the NY Times to National Review, and departments in many universities, too. Oh, and let’s not forget the billionaire donors.

Despite having vast power, the neocons seem to be in perpetual anxiety. They’re like fleas on a beautiful dog—constantly worried about being scratched off.

And what might be the intellectual equivalent of the much-needed flea powder? The ideas of liberty, especially as shown forth by our two greatest anti-neocons: Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul.

I started LRC more than 15 years to support these ideas, and to tell the truth about the neocons, whom Murray had first warned me about. In the Congress and in private life, Ron has been the great anti-neocon champion.

If a grouplet is salaamed from the White House to the Congress, from the Pentagon to the CIA, why worry about opposition? Because neoconism is built on very ignoble lies, and we have the beautiful truth on our side.

So LRC has been smeared from pillar to post from the very beginning. 2014 may be the worst ever. The NY Times had a number of attacks, and have their many allies. A major search engine company joined in, and so did many paper and digital pubs.

There is no attempt to refute the ideas of freedom, peace, laissez-faire capitalism, honest money, private property, of the idea that we do not need a predatory and vicious state ruling over us, that civilization if built on commerce and trade with everyone, on the art of peace, not the weapons and mores of death.

LRC continues to reach young people, all over America and the world. I know we are doing good, because of all the attacks. They’re like anti-congressional medals of honor. But they’have had an effect, especially that giant search engine’s actions. This year, more than ever, LRC needs your help very much.

Whatever donation you can make would be a huge help, to keep LRC going. Please, bug the neocons and boost liberty, by becoming a Supporter. I can’t tell you how important this is. Please help as much as you can, as soon as you can.

PS: It seems as if the state and its pals are advancing on all fronts, but one of their weak points is youth dissent and youth skepticism towards their lies and schemes. Help me keep this going, in 2015 and going forward.

It will be fascinating to watch the unfolding debate over the lifting of the decades-old Cold War U.S. embargo against Cuba because it will enable Americans today to get a sense of what the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the military and the CIA – felt about President Kennedy when he was in office.

Already, we’re hearing that President Obama is a traitor, that he is surrendering America to Fidel Castro and the communists, and betraying the Cuban people and the cause of freedom and democracy for wanting to lift the 54-year-old Cold War-era U.S. embargo against Cuba.

That is precisely the way that the national-security establishment felt about Kennedy and actually much worse.

It began with the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, an invasion that would be carried out by Cuban exiles but secretly funded and directed by the CIA in order to provide U.S. officials with “plausible deniability” with respect to their role in the operation.

What did that mean? It meant that the CIA would lie to the American people and the world about the U.S, government’s role in the operation. And it would also mean that under the CIA’s plan, the newly elected president would immediately become the nation’s liar-in-chief, a secret that the CIA would obviously have over his head for the rest of his time in office.

Keep in mind that the CIA plan was concocted before Kennedy got into office. Once Kennedy was sworn in, the CIA presented him with the plan. Kennedy was dumb to go along with it, a point that he later acknowledged. But the fact is that he fell hook, line, and sinker for the CIA’s assurances to him that the invasion would be a smashing success, that the Cuban people would rally against Castro, and that no air U.S. support would be needed.

But the fact was that the Cuban people revered Fidel Castro and hated his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, who was the U.S. government’s brutal dictator who Castro ousted from power.

Even worse, the CIA knew that the operation could not succeed without U.S. air support.

So why did they tell Kennedy that no air support would be necessary? They set him up. They figured that once the invasion got under way and was in danger of failing, Kennedy would buckle and provide the air support in order to “save face.”

But Kennedy didn’t buckle. He refused to provide the air support and the invasion failed to achieve regime change in Cuba.

While JFK took public responsibility for the debacle, he knew what the CIA had done to him and vowed to tear into a thousand pieces. He also fired the CIA’s much-revered CIA director, Allen Dulles, who, ironically, would be later appointed to serve on the Warren Commission.

For its part, the CIA considered Kennedy to be a weakling, an appeaser, a traitor, and a betrayer.

Then from 1961 to 1963, the military establishment was doing everything it could to pressure Kennedy into launching a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. The mindset was the same old Cold War mindset that still guides today’s Cold War dead-enders: that if a communist is permitted to be president of a Latin American country, it won’t be long before communists are running the IRS, the Interstate Highway System, and the rest of the federal government.

Of course, that old Cold War mindset was as ludicrous then as it is now.

But not to the Pentagon. Consider, for example, Operation Northwoods, which was a Pentagon plan that was unanimously recommended to Kennedy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It called for terrorist attacks on American soil and the hijacking of civilian airliners.

Guess who would do the terrorism and the hijacking under Operation Northwoods. Secret U.S. agents who would be acting as though they were Castro’s agents! Then, the president’s job would be to go on national television and falsely announce, “We’ve been attacked by Cuba! We have a right to defend ourselves and so we’re invading Cuba and effecting regime change there.”

Oh, by the way, the plan called for innocent Americans to be killed so that the American people would be less likely to ask questions and to blindly support a military invasion to remove a communist threat to U.S. “national security” that was supposedly emanating from Cuba. Yes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were actually willing to sacrifice innocent Americans to concoct a false and fraudulent excuse to go to war against Cuba, a war that undoubtedly would have taken the lives of thousands of U.S. and Cuban soldiers and Cuban citizens.

To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he summarily rejected Operation Northwoods and refused to invade Cuba, a country that had never attacked the United States.

And then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which the military and the CIA believed constituted a victory for the Soviet Union and a humiliating loss for the United States. After all, as the national-security establishment pointed out, in the deal that Kennedy made with Soviet
leader Khrushchev, Kennedy promised that the United States would not invade Cuba if the Soviets withdrew their missiles. So, the Soviets actually got what they wanted out of the crisis. Moreover, the Soviets also secured a secret agreement from Kennedy to remove U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey that were aimed at the Soviet Union.

While we should be eternally grateful to Kennedy for working out a deal that prevented all-out nuclear war, that’s not the way the military and the CIA saw it. They saw it as the supreme betrayal on the part of the president toward Cuban exiles, the Cuban people, the American people, and to the entire national-security establishment whose mission, as they saw it, was to protect “national security” from the communists. By leaving a permanent communist outpost 90 miles away from American shores, military and CIA officials were firmly convinced that Kennedy had left intact a grave threat to “national security” pointed directly toward the United States.

By this time, Kennedy had achieved the same breakthrough about the grave danger that the military-industrial complex posed to our very own country, a point that President Eisenhower had made in his remarkable Farewell Address and the same breakthrough that former President Truman had reached about the CIA having become a sinister force in America’s governmental structure, as reflected in his Washington Post op-ed published a month after the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy’s breakthrough regarding the Cold War and America’s national-security state apparatus was reflected in his famous Peace Speech at American University five months before he was assassinated.

The last straw was Kennedy’s attempt to end the Cold War and the embargo against Cuba through secret negotiations with Khrushchev and Castro, negotiations in which he totally ignored and circumvented his national-security establishment.

Of course, the dramatically different direction that Kennedy was taking America came to a screeching halt on November 22, 1963. As we all know, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, immediately restored the old Cold War direction. That included a termination of the secret negotiations between Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro to end the Cold War and to dismantle the U.S. embargo against Cuba. While Johnson refused to give the national-security establishment its much-desired invasion of Cuba, he did give them their war in Vietnam.

We’ll hear much of this same sort of Cold War tripe in the months ahead, as the debate over lifting the embargo gets going. What the Cold War dead-enders will fail to tell us is why they don’t take the same position toward Vietnam and China that they do against Cuba.

During the Christmas holiday, I had the opportunity to visit with high-school and a college-age nephew, nieces, and their friends in Texas. Watching an extremely harrowing scene involving air-to-air combat in the movie Unbroken, my teen-age niece turned to me and asked, “Is that the way war really is?” I responded, “Much worse.”

Back at my brother’s house after the movie, what really struck me was how oblivious these young people are to the possibility of a major war suddenly breaking out owing to the many defense alliances in which the U.S. is involved, a war that would inevitably involve a draft of young men and quite possibly young women as well, many of whom would be dying and getting maimed for no good reason, like they did in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

I brought up Korea, a grave risk to young people that my nephew, nieces, and their friends have never even remotely considered.

Today, there are thousands of American troops stationed in Korea, many of whom are stationed near the demilitarized zone at the border between North Korea and South Korea.

The reason for those U.S. troops in South Korea? To guarantee that in the event of the outbreak of war between the North and South, the United States will be automatically involved in the war. In such an invasion, it is a certainty that U.S. troops would be killed. That’s the idea. They are considered sacrificial lambs to guarantee that the United States would be in the war, without the necessity of debating or discussing the issue here at home.

Let’s assume, hypothetically speaking, that there were no U.S. troops stationed in Korea. Let’s assume that North Korea attacked South Korea. What would happen?

At that point, the United States would not be automatically committed to involving itself in the conflict. The nation would have the option of staying out of the conflict.

Let’s not forget, after all, that the Constitution requires the president to seek a congressional declaration of war before the president can legally wage war against a foreign nation. That’s not to say of course that President Obama would comply with that portion of the Constitution. Certainly, President Truman sent some 50,000 U.S. troops to their deaths in the Korean War in the early 1950s without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war. But at least the nation would still not be automatically committed to the conflict, which it would be today, given the sacrificial “tripwire” that U.S. forces in Korea serve as.

An interventionist would undoubtedly respond, “Jacob, don’t you think we have a moral duty to come to the assistance of the South Koreans? And if we don’t stop the communists in Korea, don’t you think that the dominoes will start to fall and that the communists will finally take over America?”

My answer: Every American, including every interventionist, would be free to travel to South Korea and join up with the South Korean forces. There is absolutely no reason that the U.S. government should continuing serving as the world’s international policeman, especially since the situation in Korea is nothing more than a civil war, just as the conflict in Vietnam was. We should also keep in mind that the Cold War, which posited nations falling like dominoes to the communists, ended some 25 years ago.

Would another Korean War be unfortunate and tragic? Of course. There would be massive death, maiming, and destruction.

But lots of bad things happen around the world. The fact that such bad things happen doesn’t make them the responsibility of the U.S. government or the American people. That’s what John Quincy Adams was saying in his Fourth of July, 1821, speech to Congress, entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.” He said that America’s founding principles dictated a non-interventionist foreign policy, one in which the federal government did not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” If the United States were ever to go in the opposite direction, Adams said, the U.S. government would begin embracing the programs and policies of dictatorial regimes.

Here’s an important and revealing question for every American to ponder: If war were to suddenly break out in Korea and there were no U.S. troops stationed there, how many Americans would volunteer to go fight on the side of South Korea?

My answer: None. Not one single American would do so. Even if President Obama announced that he was willing to give an early discharge to an U.S. soldier who wanted to travel to South Korea to help out the South Koreans, my hunch is that not one single soldier would take him up on his offer. Most important, I am 100 percent certain that not one single interventionist,especially those who always display great courage in sending U.S. troops into foreign wars, would volunteer to fight on the side of the South Koreans.

Why do I say that? Because while Americans would certainly sympathize with the people of South Korea, they place a higher value on their own lives and their own family life here at home than they do on risking their lives and the well-being of their families by fighting in a foreign civil war thousands of miles away. And no, I don’t believe that one single American would fall for the line that if South Korea were to fall, the communists would soon be running the IRS, the DEA, and the Interstate Highway System.

I‘d venture most high-school and college students are totally oblivious to the risks involved here. They would be wise to awaken to such risks because the time to dismantle the tripwire and bring the U.S. sacrificial lambs home is now. If war breaks out in Korea, it will be too late.

Senator Rand Paul and his wife posted a holiday message on youtube recently in which Rand says "As we come together to celebrate this holiday season, let us pause for a moment to remember the brave men and women serving our country at home and abroad. We thank you and your families for the sacrifice that you make to protect and maintain our freedom."

Compare Rand's silly platitudes with that of his father, Dr. Ron Paul:

"I'm the commander in chief. I make the decisions. I tell the generals what to do. I'd bring them home as quickly as possible. And I would get them out of Iraq as well. And I wouldn't start a war in Libya. I'd quit bombing Yemen. And I'd quit bombing Pakistan. Our national security is not enhanced by our presence over there. We have no purpose there. We should learn the lessons of history. The longer we're there, the worse things are and the more danger we're in, because our presence there is not making friends." [link]

"The notion that terrorists attack us because of our freedom & prosperity, and not for our actions abroad, is grossly wrong. If Americans accept the argument that we are threatened because of our freedoms, rather than because American troops are stationed in many places where they are deeply resented, our problems can only get worse."

DailyPaul.com:

Stop thanking the troops for me: No, they don't "protect our freedoms"
LewRockwell.com: An Open Letter to the Troops: You’re Not Defending Our Freedoms
"Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon." Ron Paul

Why does Obama come up with such quick judgments on news events and make them public? Whether it’s the downing of MH17, the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the death of Michael Brown, or the hacking of Sony, Obama hastily tells everyone what happened even though he cannot possibly know what has happened. Why does he do this?

In each case, he clearly has an agenda that he wishes to promote. He has ulterior motives. He wants to use the events to advance his political agenda. Whenever he does this, he can be proven wrong — later on. But since he has spoken out early and loudly and since he gets instant and wide publicity, his version becomes the predominant version. Even if it doesn’t predominate, he has managed the news to his own satisfaction. He has altered the attitudes or perceptions of a certain segment of the population, and this has advanced his agenda. He has advanced the reality he’s after, and he has made it come true. His position is so powerful that, with some care and skill, he creates “truth” and reality. What he says about events may later be shown to be false. He’s willing to take that risk and live with it in order to advance his agenda, which is the “truth” or reality he’s after. There’s usually enough uncertainty surrounding events that he can make a plausible-sounding case for his version. The public is not interested in knowing the truth or meaning of many events anyway, and their attention is onto the next story.

There is the truth obtained by careful consideration of causes and effects. This truth is one of understanding and knowledge. This is not what Obama or any politician is after. Their idea of truth is what is real, or what occurs, or what is material reality. The politicians think in terms of objects and what is or is not, as experienced in objects. People to them are objects for manipulation. The free mind and personality are not valued by those who have this will to dominance. They manipulate, as masters to slaves. Their manipulation of the minds of the people who live under their rule is surely of no less importance, and perhaps of greater importance, than all the material aggressions of the state. If people do not mind those material inroads and think of them as not aggressions, they will think themselves free when actually their minds and thoughts have been conditioned and heavily influenced and controlled. The problem here is that, with enough conditioning, slaves can think themselves free.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Homeschooled children have higher graduation rates, more social prowess
by: Antonia

Homeschooling, once steeped in negativity and subject to eyebrow-raising naysayers, is fast-sweeping the nation as an alternative educational method that comes with higher graduation rates than traditional schooling.(1) In fact, there are approximately 2.2 million students in the United States who receive home education, and experts note that its popularity has continued, rather than waned, through the years. These students have been found to score up to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.(2)

With homeschooling, children are taught under the direction of family members who maintain that learning at home allows youngsters to obtain customized instruction that public schools do not regularly provide, while simultaneously strengthening family relationships in a safe environment.(2)

Higher graduation rates, test scores among homeschooled children
Of homeschooled children, 66.7 percent have been found to graduate from a four-year college, whereas those who went to a public school had a 57.5 percent graduation rate.(1) The finding came as a result of a 2009 University of St. Thomas study that analyzed homeschool students' academics versus those in more traditional educational systems. Not only was there a higher college graduation rate, but compared to public, private and Catholic schooling, those who were homeschooled were found to have the highest GPA and also outperformed in college preparedness tests for reading, science and English.(2)

Homeschooled children more prepared socially for real-world scenarios
One stereotype that often floods those who choose to homeschool their children is that they are isolated at home and, therefore, most likely to be socially awkward and not easily capable of interacting with others. However, Brain Ray, National Home Education Research Institute president, feels otherwise.(3)

He notes that most homeschool students are active volunteers, are involved in sports or are engaged with others through book clubs. "Research shows that in terms of self-concept, self-esteem and the ability to get along in groups, homeschoolers do just as well as their public school peers," he said.(3)

Another advocate of homeschooling is Jeffrey Koonce, a school superintendent in Miller County, Missouri. So convinced is he that homeschooled children fare better than those who are not, Koonce wrote his doctoral dissertation on how homeschool students handle their transition to a public high school environment. He discovered that it wasn't uncommon for homeschooled children to hear the students in the high school talk about sexual activity and drunken behaviors, and adds that the homeschooled children took on the "get real... get a life" mindset.(3)

Koonce concluded that the majority of the time, homeschooled children were more mature and socially adept than their non-homeschooled peers.(3)

When last we left America’s disgruntled fast-food army, the foot soldiers in the burger and chicken wars were angling for $15 an hour — a fair wage, they reasoned, in the world’s (supposedly) wealthiest country. They simply cannot live on $7.25 an hour, the current minimum wage.

So early this month they staged — yet again — another show of frustration by going on strike in 150 cities, protesting to raise the minimum wage. What they lack in economic understanding, they certainly make up for in gumption and perseverance.

But they — and those who support the raise — should be very wary of the effects of a minimum wage increase. To wit, we return to Switzerland.

I was in Zurich the week before Thanksgiving and found myself peckish while walking around the city. I popped into a sidewalk burger joint popular with students and ordered a burger, fries and Coke Zero.

To be clear, this was not a gourmet burger. This was not even a casual-restaurant burger, a la Chili’s or Applebee’s. This was the equivalent of a McDonald’s quarter pounder, cooked on the same type of flattop griddle, served in a place where you stand and eat quickly before moving on.

It was simply, your basic burger.

And it cost the equivalent of $23.80 — for a basic burger, some fries and a Coke Zero in a plastic bottle, no ice.

A few days later, over a pricey fondue with my friend Rob Vrijhof, a Swiss money manager, I asked why such a basic meal should cost nearly $25. I suspected I knew the answer (local wages), and Vrijhof confirmed my suspicion.

Switzerland doesn’t have a minimum wage law, but “what is a minimum wage here gets you to almost 50,000 francs a year [$52,000],” Vrijhof told me between bites of country bread dipped into bubbling cheese. “That’s for the guy who’s mopping the floor at Migros [a local supermarket chain]. So that tells you what educated employees are earning.”

Vrijhof’s daughter is 19. And as soon as she graduates her apprenticeship program, she’ll be working in a local bank earning well in excess of $100,000 a year — at 19!

Fast-food America will look at hourly wages in Switzerland that routinely run toward $25 and argue that it’s criminal for America to pay its minimum-wage workers so meagerly. But, as they say, reality bites. And in this case, it has the potential to bite all of America quite hard if fast-food workers and their supporters win the day.
Trickle-up economics

The guy who made my burger in Zurich would effectively need to work one hour (at $25 per) to afford the burger, fries and soft drink that I bought that afternoon.

And, ironically, the burger-flipper in America who today earns $7.25 would need to work basically the same hour to afford a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with cheese meal, mimicking what I ate.

This is a crucial comparison, because I routinely read and hear supporters of a radically higher minimum wage comparing U.S. pay to other advanced nations that pay more. But those facts are always presented in a vacuum. Wage increases do not happen without having a commensurate knock-on effect, meaning a tendency toward rising prices. It’s a basic economic fact: A larger sum of money floating around the system will see more money chasing a relatively unchanged amount of goods — and that’s inflation.

Talking heads these days exclaim that states that raised their minimum wage in recent years have not seen inflation and, therefore, rising wages clearly don’t lead to inflation. Way too premature, dudes — and way too small beer. Wait until larger incomes are impacting the economy at a national level, and give the money time to flow through the worker’s pocketbooks, maybe a few years. Then come talk to me.

A minimum wage of $15 an hour will put upward pressure on salaries all the way into the middle class, as it has done in Switzerland. It’s simple street smarts. If I’m a shift-manager earning $15 an hour to manage burger flippers earning $7.25, what do you think I’m going to do when my underling is now making my salary? And what about the store manager who suddenly finds her shift managers are all making her salary? It’s trickle-up economics. And it will, without question, put upward pressure on prices for things all of us buy in America — like hamburger meals.

So fight on, my fast-food buddies. But understand your victory will be pyrrhic, at best. Should you win a higher wage, you will one day soon enough find that the $7 you pay for a burger meal today will be $15 tomorrow — and you will be back in the same box you so loathe now.

Even the Swiss realize that high wages are a root cause of the excessive costs in their country. This past spring, they overwhelmingly voted “No” to setting what would have been the world’s highest minimum wage.

The one salvation for the rest of us: Own gold and silver. Wage pressures will undoubtedly unlock inflation pressures, and gold and silver are your insurance policy to protect your lifestyle when the dollar suddenly drops in rank among the global currencies.

Pictured above are some color TVs from the 627-page 1964 Sears Christmas Catalog, available here at the WishbookWeb website along with many other Christmas catalogs from 1933 to 1988. The original prices are listed ($750 for the Sears Silvertone entertainment center and $800 for the more expensive one), and those prices are also shown converted to today’s 2014 dollars using the BLS Inflation Calculator: $5,700 for the basic 21-inch color TV model and $6,100 for the more expensive model.

To put that in perspective, the pictures below illustrate what about $5,700 in today’s dollars (actually only $5,600) would buy in the 2014 marketplace using current prices from the Sears and Best Buy websites:

Bottom Line: For an American consumer or household spending $750 in 1964, they would have been able to purchase the 21-inch color TV/entertainment center from the Sears Christmas catalog pictured above (includes phonograph and AM/FM radio). An American consumer or household spending that same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars today (about $5,600) would be able to furnish their entire kitchen with 5 brand-new appliances (refrigerator, gas stove and oven, washer, dryer, and freezer) and buy 7 state-of-the-art electronic items for their home (a Toshiba Satellite 14″ laptop computer, a Garmin 5 Inch GPS, a Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR Camera, a Sony 1,000 Watt, 5.1-Channel 3D Smart Blu-Ray Home Theater System, a Sharp 50 inch LED HDTV, an Apple iPod Touch 32GB MP3 Player, and an Apple iPhone 6 [with 2-year contract]). And of course, even a billionaire in 1964 wouldn’t have been able to purchase many of the items that even a teenager can afford today, e.g. laptop computer, GPS, iPhone, digital camera.

As much as we might complain about a slow economic recovery, the decline of the middle class, stagnant median household income, rising income inequality and a dysfunctional Congress, we have a lot to be thankful for, and we’ve made a lot of economic progress in the last 50 years as the example above illustrates, thanks to the “magic and miracle of the marketplace.”

As the defining domestic national security event since 9/11, the Boston Marathon Bombing has played a major role in expanding the power of the security state. Although the media quickly accepted the government’s assertions that it had captured the culprits, that the culprits were “lone wolves” and that there was nothing more to the story, an ongoing exclusive investigation by WhoWhatWhy, launched the week of the event, suggests otherwise.

In the course of our inquiries, we have found and documented a veritable mountain of dubious official claims, inconsistencies and outright lies—plus a concerted campaign to prejudice the public regarding the accused, prior to trial. We have also reported on a campaign of harassment against prospective witnesses whose knowledge might cast doubt on the accepted narrative. We have made no judgments or claims about guilt or innocence, but we are certain that the full story has been obscured from the very start. The big question? Why.

We intend to keep pressing for answers, so stay tuned to WhoWhatWhy for additional exclusive coverage through the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and beyond. In the meantime, you can get up to speed with this hand-picked selection of our most essential stories below. (Here’s the full list of our coverage from the beginning.)

The FBI’s War on Boston Witnesses: Why has the FBI been harassing, deporting (and, in one case, killing) friends of the Tsarnaev brothers? This makes no sense if, as the government has claimed, the brothers acted alone. Do these people know something the Bureau doesn’t want them to reveal?

Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI? Peter Dale Scott examines the possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an FBI informant who also worked with the Russians. The documented fact the FBI knew and interacted with him prior to the bombings suggests there’s more to the story.

The Marathon Bombing: What the Media Didn’t Warn You About: Our immensely popular post by Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker, published four days after the bombing, was perhaps the first moment at which anyone raised doubts about the rapidly “concluded” investigation and the media’s coalescence around an official narrative. It remains essential reading for real “media literacy” and healthy skepticism toward institutions that have repeatedly misled the public.

Boston MIT Cop Cover-Up: Russ Baker chronicles a pattern of dissembling and inconsistencies in the official accounts of the execution of an MIT police officer—an event that was crucial in the public portrayal of the Tsarnaevs as murder-minded men.

Boston Carjacking Unravels: Part 1 and Part 2: Our exclusive investigation uncovered serious factual discrepancies between various accounts provided by the mysterious “Danny,” the sole witness to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s purported confession to the bombing and to the MIT cop’s killing. Given this anonymous person’s centrality to the official narrative, these clashing stories call into account the entire bombing story told by the authorities and passed along uncritically by the media. For more, please watch Russ Baker speaking to Boston’s public television station WGBH about our discoveries:

Monday, December 22, 2014

You are guilty, as are the NRA, the NAGR, all pro-gun organizations, and all American gun lovers, of interpreting the 2nd Amendment to fit your agenda. All of you forget that it was written over 200 years ago FOR MEMBERS OF MILITIAS AS THEY EXISTED BACK THEN. THE 2ND AMENDMENT DOES NOT GIVE YOU AND OTHERS LIKE YOU THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS. All of you are making believe that the first few words of the 2nd Amendment do not exist. BUT, THEY DO -“A WELL REGULATED MILITIA…”. Actually, you all should read the 2nd Amendment again. And, don’t give me that crap about the Supreme Court interpreting the 2nd Amendment your way. They have been wrong a few times in the last few years (ever since they became an arm of the Republican and tea parties).

If you would, please reply to this. Yet, like the rest of the pro-gun backers, you are probably afraid to reply because you know I’m right.

Frank L Duley

Dear Frank L Duley,

You write: “You are guilty … and all American gun lovers, of interpreting the 2nd Amendment to fit your agenda.” It needs no interpretation. Like all of the Constitution, it is quite clear and easy to understand. And given that my “agenda” is liberty and Constitutional governance, there is no confusion about supporting it or abiding by it.

You write: “All of you forget that it was written over 200 years ago FOR MEMBERS OF MILITIAS AS THEY EXISTED BACK THEN.” I have not forgotten when the Constitution was written, but you are partially correct. Tench Coxe described the militia this way: “Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American … The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” In a speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, George Mason said: “I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” “A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves … and include… all men capable of bearing arms. … The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle,” wrote Richard Lee as the Federal Farmer. The Militia Act of 1792 defines the militia as all able bodied men ages 18 to 45. Further, it requires all of them to provide their own arms and ammunition, which were the military weapons of the day. The fact that the U.S. government, against the advice of the Founders, has created a standing army does not negate the fact that militias can and do still exist and that every American still has the right to “keep and bear arms.”

You write: “THE 2ND AMENDMENT DOES NOT GIVE YOU AND OTHERS LIKE YOU THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.” You are correct. Government does not give me any rights. My rights — and yours — come from God. God gives me and others like me the right to keep and bear arms. The 2nd Amendment was established to restrict government from infringing on that right.

You write: “All of you are making believe that the first few words of the 2nd Amendment do not exist. BUT, THEY DO -“A WELL REGULATED MILITIA…” I cannot speak for others that make up your “all of you,” but as for myself, I have never believed or stated that the first few words of the 2nd Amendment do not exist. The difference between you and me is that I understand what the Founders meant by “well regulated Militia.” According to “An American Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. II” by Noah Webster, published in 1828, the definition of “regulated” is this: “adjusted by rule, method or forms, put in good order, subjected to rules or restrictions.” The “Random House College Dictionary” (1980) gives one more definition dating from 1690 and relating to troops: “properly disciplined.” So well regulated, to the Founders, meant a group of troops put in good order and properly disciplined. It is curious, however, that while you accuse me of ignoring the opening clause of the Amendment, you willfully ignore the closing one: “…shall not be infringed.”

You write: “Actually, you all should read the 2nd Amendment again.” Done. It says the same thing it said the last time I read it, and every other time before that. It is quite clear.

You write: “And, don’t give me that crap about the Supreme Court interpreting the 2nd Amendment your way. They have been wrong a few times in the last few years (ever since they became an arm of the Republican and tea parties).” The Supreme Court is an arm of government and corporations and, as such, rules on behalf of government and corporations. If you believe otherwise, you are delusional.

You write: “If you would, please reply to this. Yet, like the rest of the pro-gun backers, you are probably afraid to reply because you know I’m right.” You are wrong on both counts: I am not “afraid to reply,” nor are you “right.” These two links (here and here) should set you aright, if you are willing to be honest.

“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying ­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.” - George Carlin

After the disgusting example of politicians of both spineless parties bowing down before Wall Street, the military industrial complex and corporate interests this weekend with the passage of a bloated pig of a spending bill totaling $1.1 trillion, how can anyone not on the payroll of the vested interests not admit there is only one party – and it serves only the needs of the wealthy business interests. Obama, champion of the common folk, signed this putrid example of political corruption and corporate capture of the American political system. For all the believers who voted for the red team in the November mid-terms, this is what you got – a bipartisanship screwing of the American people.

The entire episode has been nothing but Kabuki Theater. Both parties have proven to be puppets marching to the tune of Wall Street moneyed interests, while further entrenching the status quo by voting to allow more corporate influence over the election process. Each side of the aisle allowed just enough dissent to make it appear they might not reach an agreement. But at the end of the day Pelosi, Boehner, Reid and McConnell joined hands and gave it to the American public good and hard. And of course we had the candidates for president in 2016 Warren and Cruz playing to their constituents with speeches and maneuvers designed to make them look like fighters for the common man. It was nothing but a show, as they did nothing substantive to stop the bill from passing.

What this entire debacle has proven is that voting doesn’t matter. Your vote is meaningless. Political parties are nothing more than a front for the vested interests. The corrupt politicians are bought and sold by Wall Street and corporate interests. The bills are written by lobbyists for the vested interests. When a spending bill is over 1,700 pages, the purpose is to obscure, hide and insert provisions that will benefit those with money to influence the process at the expense of average Americans. None of the perpetrators in Congress actually read this bill. The public had no say regarding this bill. If this is what bipartisan cooperation looks like, I’ll take gridlock. The system has been so completely captured by those pulling the wires, they no longer even pretend to care what we think. They keep winning and care not about the consequences of their ruthless despicable pillaging.

Politicians decry money in politics when they are paraded onto the mainstream media talk shows. They profess to be men and women of the people, fighting for our rights. So how do they go about getting money out of politics? They dramatically expand the amount of money wealthy political donors can inject into the national parties, drastically undercutting the 2002 landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance overhaul. A wealthy donor who could only give a maximum of $32,400 this year to the Democratic National Committee or Republican National Committee can now give ten times as much – a total of $324,000. Do you think these wealthy donors might have ten times more influence over government policies, laws, regulations, and tax codes? Do you think these donors are contributing these funds to fight for the rights of average Americans making $50,000 per year? This change just further entrenches the rich vested interests. Your vote just became even more meaningless.

The most outrageous provision in the spending bill is Wall Street putting the American taxpayer on the hook for when their $250 trillion of derivatives of mass destruction blow up the worldwide financial system again. Elizabeth Warren, playing her part in this farce, feigns outrage, knowing it will pass anyway:

“Mr. President, Democrats don’t like Wall Street bailouts. Republicans don’t like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts. And yet here we are five years after Dodd-Frank with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would do nothing for the middle class, do nothing for community banks, do nothing but raise the risk that taxpayers will have to bail out the biggest banks once again. You know, there is a lot of talk lately about how Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. There is a lot of talk coming from CitiGroup about how Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. So let me say this to anyone listening at Citi —I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces. If this Congress is going to open up Dodd-Frank in the months ahead then let’s open it up to get tougher, not to create more bailout opportunities.”

Senator Warren does hit at the heart of the matter. The Too Big To Fail banks should have been made too small to matter after they created the 2008 worldwide financial collapse. Congress should have reinstated Glass Steagall, the insolvent Wall Street banks should have been liquidated or sold off piece by piece, and the American taxpayer shouldn’t have had to pay one dime. Instead, those banks became bigger, more powerful, more arrogant, and more reckless. And now they are writing the laws supposedly regulating them. Regulatory capture at its finest.

Dodd-Frank was already a behemoth mess of a law, written by bank lobbyists, and so complex it was always destined to fail. The law that set up America’s banking system in 1864 ran to 29 pages; the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 went to 32 pages; the Banking Act that transformed American finance after the Wall Street Crash, commonly known as the Glass-Steagall act, spread out to 37 pages. Dodd-Frank was 848 pages long. One of the few beneficial sections of the law was the provision that required banks to “push out” their derivatives trading into separate entities not backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Essentially, this provision prohibited the Too Big To Trust Wall Street Banks from using the deposits of customers to gamble on derivatives, with no capital behind the gambling. Any Wall Street bank that wanted to trade derivatives had to do it in non-insured subsidiaries, and when these trades blew up in their faces, the banks would be solely on the hook. They prefer the they win you lose method.

This spending bill included language written directly by Citigroup and inserted by the politicians in the back pocket of Jamie Dimon and the rest of the Wall Street cabal. Dimon showed no shame as he personally called lawmakers to insist they pass this bill with the gutting of Dodd Frank. Wall Street bankers can now gamble with the deposits of their clients with impunity generating obscene insider profits, and when they inevitably blow up the financial system again the American taxpayer will be on the hook for the losses. In a shocking development, the members who voted for the spending bill had received vastly more political contributions (bribes) than those who voted no. Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, concisely sums up the goal of this provision:

“It is because there is a lot of money at stake. They want to be able to take big risks where they get the upside and the taxpayer gets the potential downside.”

So I am a blogger now.

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Don't know if anyone will ever see it or care, but here it goes. I intend it be a humorous, music, sports and current issues flavored site with postings of links to my favorite videos, info about my favorite bands, stuff I find funny and things I find newsworthy. It might become political at times. I just can't help myself. I will also use this as a forum to put things out there for information and education sake. I like to expose people to alternative ways of viewing events both past and present. I never believe everything I read and don't claim to have all the answers despite what many of you who know me believe. Hence the title of my blog. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to pass on any comments.

Disclaimer:

Many of the articles I post here are taken from some of my favorite alternative news sites and blogs. I do my best to post the link to the the source of the original article as well as the author's name if it is provided. If someone notices any omission on my part or feels that they would prefer that I not post their articles here, please contact me. I try to post the work of others in bold and italics. My comments or any work that is original to me, is presented in regular type format. My intention is to pass on information I find interesting or important to others for informational and/or educational value. Again, if someone wishes that I not use their work, please contact me. I will gladly remove it and refrain from posting it in the future.